WD My Cloud 2/3/4TBs how to speed things up

I recently purchased a new My Cloud device from WD and I have come to love the thing, however after checking out the WD Community forums for the product and based on my own experience with the device I have decided to put up this small guide on how to improve performance and make your ride a little smoother.

After connecting and setting up My Cloud on the network you might initially find yourself with very slow transfers and and slow overall access to your cloud storage both locally and remotely, surely this will not be the experience for everyone, but at least for some it will, just like it was for me.

I discovered a few things you can do to speed things up greatly, some of these might require you to have some basic knowledge of networking and how to get into your router and change settings etc. so you’ve been warned 🙂

If you run Windows 7/8 or 8.1 you might want to follow these steps to ensure your system is properly configured for ultimate network performance.

PART I

Make sure all your Ethernet cables to and from the router and to and from the modem are at least CAT5e or above (ie: CAT6 or 7) and that you are using the supplied Ethernet cable that came with My Cloud or better, (if you have them) Once you have made sure all your hardware is linked up with top of the line cabling as explained, go into your Control Panel on your Windows 7/8/8.1/10 then go into “Administrative Tools” then into the “services” section and you need to make sure that the following 4 settings are set to “Automatic” and that they are (even) started:

Doing the above helped vastly improve my transfers to and from My Cloud, Of course I would also suggest anyone experiencing slow transfers to ensure they have a Gigabit capable router too, because having CAT6/7 won’t do any good if your router is not capable of supporting the speeds those cables deliver.

Before and when you first setup My Cloud is strongly suggested you momentarily turn off any alternate DNS services such as OpenDNS, on your router if it supports it and you use it, I learned that the hard way, once you have the device fully configured and up and running you can turn those services back on.

PART II

Now let’s go to the second part of the setup, this will ensure that you can remotely access content on your My Cloud device from the internet from anywhere in the world, after all this is the main reason we purchased this thing right?

1-) Go into your router and make sure that you have set up address reservation so as to give your My Cloud a static IP on your home network.

4-) Go into your router’s Port Forwarding/Triggering settings and setup port 20 and port 21 to properly point to your My Cloud’s device local network’s IP address, this last setting makes it possible for you to be able to remotely connect to your NAS and access all your files via the FTP protocol.

I have come to realize that the initial software releases for all web interfaces and apps for My Cloud ( with the exception of the local Dashboard which I consider to be a beautiful interface, and one of the best I have ever seen in any device) to be extremely buggy at best.

So as a work around the buggy software I strongly suggest anyone to download and use an FTP Client and use that instead of the official APPs and web the interface from www.wdmycloud.com there are many free good apps for Windows/Windows Phone/Android/iOS out there, For Windows I suggest FreeFTP free as its name implies or CuteFTP if you are into shareware software, both excellent programs.

PART III

Now the third and last part of my guide, this includes how to properly map your My Cloud shares into your Computer in Windows for easy and quick access to your files stored in My Cloud.

[……..] work in progress, I’ll update my post with this part soon.

So there you have it, my small guide to make the best out of your shining new Cloud storage from WD, Enjoy and share your thoughts questions below, oh don’t forget to share my page out there if you like it, thanks!

Hi Jons, I have seen people posting about it at the WD forums, I have not tried myself, but it seems to be possible, I wouldn’t recommend it though as it would void your warranty and bad things can happen to your device when you do unsupported modifications it wasn’t designed for, cheers!

Hello, You write put on 1-) DHCP Client 2-) NET TCP Port Sharing Service 3-) SSDP Discovery 4-) UPnP Device Host To Automatic, but then you don’t write what speeds you have ? 2,3,4 Are not automatic with me and 2 is even disabled. 3 and 4 are manual and started. What difference does it make ? Please show the differences, thanks. Cat 7 ? Why Cat 7 ? Cat 7 is only necessary in Data Storage Centers of Microsoft and Google. Even Cat 6 is not necessary, Cat 5e just alone will do the job. You can even use… Read more »

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March 5, 2014 9:13 pm

Author

Eli

Hi KJ, the difference is that I have actually seen instant recognition of My Cloud on my network after enabling those Windows services, ie: when I open “Computer” before it would take a long time to show up devices on my network, now it’s instant! I also definetly connect at higher speeds 70MBs or more where before I used to barely get 30MBs transfers from my PC to the My Cloud device. I agree CAT7 is probably not needed but if you have an almost empty highway and a crowded one to travel why not use the first one, more… Read more »

I have a 4 TB WD My Cloud. Transfer of data was terribly slow: 1MBps at maximum.
Not the WD My Cloud, but 360 Internet Security (QIHOO) was the main cause. Without security package installed the transfer speed was 10 to 12 MBps. With other internet security installed, the speed is also about 10-12 MBps.
The speed is now still limited by the used UTP cables and the backup application SyncBack.

Hi
Thanks for helping everyone
I have computer and wd mycloud connecting to swich( my router d-link 6740u support 10/100 and the switch 1G ) I just got a static IP and I want to now how to config the wd mycloud and my router to static and if I can connect to my wd mycloud just by typing my IP address or something similar?
Thanks

Thanks!!! This is exactly what I needed. I went from 6 Mbps to over 500 Mbps by entering the port forwarding information. And despite having a brand new CAT5e cable on one of my computers, changing it out for a new one resolved the issue on that one as well.

I find your postings helpful and informative. Perhaps you have an insight on another issue related to the WD My Cloud. I see period activity where the WD is sending data at the rate of 4 Mbits/sec (don’t know where to). When occurs my internet download/upload speeds are affected. No apparent cloud access by any device. Any suggestions?

hello!,I like your writing so much! share we keep up a correspondence extra about your article on AOL? I require an expert on this space to resolve my problem. May be that is you! Looking ahead to look you. ecfkddecafed

Hi Eli — any chance you’d know how to speed up performance on a Mac as well? The time it takes just to populate a window with a list of files is excruciatingly slow, and WD has been little to no help…thanks in advance for any advice you may have!

Please do you have a answer to speed up performance on a iMac
It takes forever to do anything. Just updating info on the dashboard can take minutes!
My Cloud connected to Hawaii HG533 router (Talktalk)
I’m not too knowledgeable with networking!!
Regards
Brian
All cables are solid Cat5e

I had very slow transfer rates on my Mac and PC I mostly use the MyCloud for photos so I had many folders in the base Shared Photos folder. Moving them from the base to separated by year ie. 2004, 2005, 2006 … and all photo folders for each year under that helped a ton. Also I replaced all my switches with gigabit ethernet switches, and ran new Cat6 Cables. Made sure the MyCloud was not on my 10/100 router but instead connected directly to my GB Switch. Much faster. Transfer speeds went from 10-30mb to 100-300mb so quite an… Read more »

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August 26, 2014 4:29 pm

Guest

allen

can you explain how to set up static ip to use the mycloud and not mess up anything else…just ordered it.
Thanks

Followed your steps Part 1 and Part 2. When I try to copy or delete file over the Windows Explorer for my mapped wdmycloud drive, it is still extremely slow. I got the mapped mycloud drive by logging into the wd2go website and selecting my shared folder which map a drive in Windows Explorer.

I am not sure how to FTP my folder via Internet since my outside IP is dynamic. I think I need to ddns to a domain website like dnsdyn….am i right?

I recently purchased D-Link 2750 router and I have WD Book Live (1 TB). I am trying to accedd it wirelessly through router. But i am unable to connetc WD via router.
Need help. What settings do I need to chang.. I do not know much about networking.

Eureka!!! Truly excellent advice. I was having latency and extremely unpredictable connection problems with the WD windows 8.1 app. I was able to access the drive from my computer (most of the time), but access via the app kept losing the device, and when it did connect properly it was painfully slow and never seemed to get to the end of discovery all of the folders. My settings were the same as KT’s above and those very simple adjustments made the difference between loving this drive, and sending it back to WD as possibly defective. Thank you, Eli, for taking… Read more »

I just bought two 12TB MyClouds and have them hooked up to my iMac through a 1GB switch. I’ve got 6TB drives on Thunderbolt. I’m transferring a 100GB file (iPhoto) from the 6TB to the new 12TB. It’s taken 7 hours, but it seems to zip through a few GB’s saying it’ll be an hour and then grind to a halt for a while, while the copy dialog suggests it will take 27 days. It’s been cycling all day. The 1GB green lights remain lit on the switch. Any thoughts?

Lee thanks for reading my blog, the Operating system (OS) graphical indicators sometimes get confused when transferring such large files, the 27 days remaining is most definitely incorrect and just erroneous reading, 100GBs of data is a lot of data, but it shouldn’t take 7 hours, perhaps you need to reboot all devices and try again?

Hi
I have WD Mycloud 3TB drive connected to my basic wifi adsl modem.
I have the same problem as most of the people here. Tremendously slow data transfer speeds.

I have couple of questions:
1. If I upgrade my ADSL router to a Gigabit router, would the data transfer speed change drastically?
2. Again upgrading the router to Gigabit would increase the wireless transfer rate?

Upgrading to Gigabit router is a costly thing. Need to be sure before I invest into it.

Nitin upgrading to a gigabit router definitely increases the overall speed of your network on both wireless and Ethernet connected devices, I would def advice you to upgrade, get an A/C router so you are also future proof. I cannot think of a single negative of getting a gigabit device, however you can always return it and get something else if it doesn’t work for you, which I seriously doubt it could happen, also don’t forget to get your cat5 cables to connect your modem to your router and from the router to computer if your PC is connected via… Read more »

Eli, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to post a solution to this aggravating problem of instability and slow throughput. I have owned the WD Mycloud for nearly six months and have lost nearly a third of my hair trying to solve the problem. What I don’t understand is why Western Digital has not figured this out and posted a solution more than a year ago. I was poised this weekend to canibalize the drive and try and use it as a fixed external drive forgoing the NAS features and remote access. Your efforts are greatly appreciated.… Read more »

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April 25, 2015 11:19 am

Guest

KC

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!! Modifying those services has me FINALLY seeing the transfer rates I should be seeing.

Hi Eli – in a previous article you wrote about Ooma, which I have also used for several years now. By default Ooma device sits in front of the router, which depending on router (mine=older Apple router) can make it difficult to see a NAS device remotely. My question – where does your router sit in relationship with Ooma and WD My Cloud, and what if any adjustments to make it work? Many thanks!

Hi Gary, I have my Telo behind the router, actually all my home devices are behind the router, if you have a good router with gigabit ports and at least CAT5 or 6 Ethernet cables you shouldn’t have any problems with Ooma with this setup, I know Ooma recommends the other way around, but I can’t for the love of me understand why they would suggest that, that’s bad advice period. Ooma ports are not Gigabit ports as far as I know and right there goes your WD MyCloud speed (Even if you have a good router and cables) if… Read more »

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August 13, 2015 6:13 pm

Guest

anon

Hi,

So if I understand correctly, we’re to point ports 443, 80, 20, 21 to the router’s IP, or the NAS IP?

Thanks very much for posting this! I am still having issues though. My main source of confusion right now is what exactly to put in the router: external port, internal port, tcp/udp or both for protocol, also, what to put in the WD My Cloud UI: I can put 8080 and 8443 as I have read elsewhere, but it always changes them to 80 and 443 so I assume that is what is intended. Do I put 20 for external and internal, same for 21.

Hi Dave, thanks for stopping by, you should select both TCP/UDP on the router settings, I would leave the default ports 80 and 443, now remember that these must be the same ports indicated on WDMyCloud or otherwise it won’t work. To be able to FTP into your WDMyCloud using a regular FTP client you must also forward ports 21 and 22 on your router to the WDMyCLoud’s IP address and you must select TCP only as the protocol. Now remember that when you attempt to connect remotely to your device you have to input your network’s public IP address… Read more »

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September 4, 2015 12:42 pm

Guest

Adventure

Over kill. The Western Digital My Cloud products are very poor implementation of the implemented technologies. It would be better to purchase a proper NAS Server.

Hi Paul, Thank you for visiting, when I upgraded to Windows 10 I did not need to do that, however this might not be the case for some people, what I have come to realize is that sometimes security programs such as firewalls and anti virus software among others are the ones which change the default networking settings in Windows to increase security, however while doing that they mess up other programs or devices ( ie: MyCloud) from connecting properly to the network, so unless you are having latency or connection issues you should need to do it, hope this… Read more »

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January 9, 2016 3:05 pm

Guest

Paul Richardson

Hi Eli,

Thanks for the response.

I don’t have a speed problem, but when I am playing video files from the My Cloud on my Minix PC it seems to lose it’s connection at least a couple of times per evening and often more.

By reselecting the file it finds it again and will play it again.

My Minix is located under my PC and is displaying the videos on the TV via HDMI.

Hi Eli, Thanks for the wonderful help. I also have a similar kind of issue with WD My cloud 4tb as it is also giving very low transfer rates. I’ll describe my setup and issue. I am having a gig lan switch (Netgear GS 208 unmanaged switch) which connects my pc and wd cloud both are 1 gb lan enabled. I can see that on my pc in Local Area Connection Status and on the Lan led of Drive also the stable light and blinking lights both are green. I don’t have any lan led on back of my switch… Read more »

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February 9, 2016 4:48 am

Author

Eli

Hi Robin Verma, sorry for the late response but I have been so busy these days, thanks for visiting too, as for what you have described I can’t really pint point what might be slowing down your transfer rate, ( although they are not extremely slow as per your post) perhaps this is a software issue, do you have a software firewall installed on your computer? if so be sure to create rules to allow the WD MyCloud ports to be open and unrestricted. Also if you do not have a router, I do not believe you will be able… Read more »

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February 13, 2016 11:25 am

Guest

Denis Strapac

Hi, I want to ask , what is the file transfer speed when I copy files within Windows or mac, not on a network?

Hello Tom, I believe this was an option in previous versions of Windows under Control panel, however if you are using Windows 8/8.1 or Windows 10 Then you must go into Control Panel/ Administrative Tools/Services, I have updated my post to reflect this, thanks for pointing it out.

FTP Manager Lite is one of the best free FTP and SFTP client software. The clean interface is super easy to use. It will perform your files transfers quickly and efficiently. It also supports FXP for superfast server to server transfers.http://www.deskshare.com/ftp-manager-free.aspx

Hi, can you help with Mac OSX settings? for speed. Currently I am trying to download a large folder (700gb) from mycloud to my desktop. It is taking forever and often crashes after a couple hours just stops working…

currently downloading at 9-9.4 mb/sec.

I am also at a loss as to how to get the static IP for the mycloud device so I can change those settings as well (sleep/rest mode settings) as I think that may be part of the problem as well. thank you!

Michelle thank you for your post, I don’t have a lot of knowledge regarding MacOS X, however the speed you describe doesn’t seem too bad (if you posted it correctly) when downloading very large files the transfer may take longer, you could definitely try my suggestions on the post such as higher speed cables and the such, the static IP must be assigned in your router, can you tell me exactly what router you have?

So far I went thru and set those 4 main things to Automatic, 1st was set, 2nd was disabled last 2 were started but set as manual, restarted pc but still getting 6mb transfers (brutally slow when trying to move 1tb of data). I am using all cat 6 cable btw on windows 7 pro. I have turned off antivirus and all spyware type stuff, nothing else running even, task mgr shows 8% cpu and 2.4gb ram with much headroom on both so i doubt it’s stressing the machine, maybe I will reset the cloud drive too? I wonder if… Read more »

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August 23, 2016 11:24 am

Author

Eli

Hi there, yes the setup must be done on each computer involved in a transfer, at work now, but I’ll be home later, I can try and lead you through the router stuff, do you have Skype?

I’m using WD My Passport Wireless 2 TB and this is the second one I’ve ordered in the last 2 weeks. The problem is that on wifi in loading files it is super slow so, can you please tell me how to speed things up a little bit.

Hello all, I have a wdmc 4T unit that operated well till win 10, Before 10 I could transfer files back and forth to the unit all day using win explorer, No problem, then 10 ….. , didn’t realize at first with no problem uploading to the unit then came the day I tried to retrieve a file or two …. specifically about 100 camera shots from vacation (about 25 megs) In WE as before I would cut and paste but now the transfer starts and drops to zero and calculates and calculates then errors then calculates some more. Thought… Read more »

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September 24, 2016 11:31 pm

Author

Eli

@blubrd you say:

“Thought is was a network thing so hooked up directly via network cable ….”

How exactly are you connecting to the WDMyCloud device? it must be connected directly to the router then you access the files that way using Windows Explorer, or you can also access them via FTP if you have enabled FTP on the WDMyCloud Dashboard.

Do you have network discovery enabled in your Windows 10 machine? Also is File Sharing enabled in your Windows 10 settings? if those two are disabled you will surely run into issues when transferring files across the network.

Hello Eli, Ok to make things clear, we first purchased this unit before w10, we were running w7 at the time, Comcast modem no problem on the network. it was plug and play. No port forwarding or static IP. I also have a MyBook 2t usb that works like a champ. I made the changes in services you suggested above and found a utube video on how to run the MC4t via network cable directly to my pc bi-passing the network altogether. It was ez with full access and navigation, then the big test ….. same thing, starts out with… Read more »

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September 26, 2016 7:29 pm

Author

Eli

Blubrd hmmm I can think of so many reasons that could be causing your issue, first of all, have you tried running the MyCloud device normally behind the router like it was designed to? Have you checked your cables to make sure they are not damaged? are the cables good quality? is the slow speed happening when transferring files from the MyCloud device to your computer or vice versa? Have you tried turning off security programs such as your Antivirus and anti Malware momentarily and trying a transfer that way? Do you use a software firewall or any type of… Read more »

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September 26, 2016 8:27 pm

Guest

blubrd

Eli, lets run it down, unfortunately its the same using the router or directly connected to the pc, cables are good and have tried several different all cat5. There is no problem uploading files to the MC, no delay no drop off and no calculating. Only when retrieving files does this problem occur. I use AVG antivirus no malware. I would think if it was a firewall issue or anti-vir firewall there would be no contact or transfer at all. … Yet the MC is viable and navigable. DL starts and a few files do come through then stalls and… Read more »

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September 26, 2016 9:42 pm

Author

Eli

Sorry for the long time to reply, maybe there’s indeed a file that has a permission issue or something like that and you will run into issues until you isolate the file with the issue and get rid of it, have you tried moving some big files on its own other than that specific folder with the pictures from your camera? try uploading a big file to the MyCloud, something at least 5GBs in size or above then try moving it back into your PC, do you still have this problem while doing that? is this happening no matter what… Read more »

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September 27, 2016 6:29 pm

Guest

Carlos

Hi,
I have found this issue several times:
If the unit is full (0 bytes free) it becomes unresponsive – every operation returns a network timeout.
Can’t do a reboot, delete files, even list the content of the folders!
Only solution is to unplug the power supply, then plug it again – only then i can delete some files.

Let’s say on average I search for some type of tech info/resolution/troubleshooting twice a month, and multiply that by 20 years, we are looking at approaching 500 sessions of needing to go beyond the self evident or supplied help. Some of those have lead to frustrating dead ends, some to a degree of resolution. But this single post of yours has far and away surpassed them all in the positive effect it has had on my everyday life. For 2 years I have accepted a ‘bad buy’ sluggish performance of the wd cloud. Having done everything i thought possible to… Read more »

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July 2, 2017 5:33 am

Author

Eli

Nick Gibbs I’m glad that after 4 years this post is still helping people, WDMyCloud has been has been an awesome device for me, still using it daily.

I quite excitedly looked to see what our tech posts you had written, hoping you’d be some kind of genius guru i’d be looking for, but i see tech is one of the less frequent post topics. doesn’t stop you being a genius, just one who chooses not to write about it. funny thing is that despite the huge improvement in speed, it is still showing as “Connected (Relay connection established), Port forwarding failed to connect on port 80 and port 443.” i thought the whole point was having a direct connection, so does this mean there is even greater… Read more »

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July 6, 2017 7:10 am

Guest

Sam Gabriel

guys if u r having slow speeds over LAN or WLAN ((NOT INTERNET)) try to disable any Offload/Offloading option under your network adapter properties, you will find it easily just dig for it, i personally got amazing wlan speeds, my only problem is over the internet i got 20 Mbps internet and my NAS is downloading files at only 500kb/sec MAAAAX which is dead slow, any help appreciated…

Sorry Eli but your ‘fix’ is technical overkill and came nowhere near solving the problem for me. We’ve used MyBook, MyBookLive and now MyCloud in our small business for the last 13 years. I’m a financial adviser, not a technical guy / network engineer. Our network was set up by a friend here in the UK, Paul, who’s a brit like me but who works at the US National Security Agency spy base at RAF Menwith Hill about 25 miles from our office. He’s a very good network guy! Experience shows that MyBook / MyCloud storage devices last on average… Read more »